Though Red Hat is poised to roll out its much-anticipated Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 release shortly, work still continues on previous versions of RHEL. This week Red Hat rolled out a beta release of its fifth update to RHEL 4 officially tagged Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5, providing users with a small taste of the virtualization that is to come in RHEL 5.

" BTW, since we're kinda sorta on the topic... any chance of Fedora Unity's respins becoming available for network installs (as opposed to downloading the entire set of CD images)? "

Dont know. They are a different group. Log in to freenode #fedora-unity and ask. They probably use just torrents because of bandwidth limitations. Pungi which both Fedora and unity folks currently use can produce whatever combinations of packages you want.

"Or for that matter, as freewheeling as FC updates are anyway, why not just have the installer include the updates repository during installation so that it installs the updated packages rather than the original packages during the initial install process?"

This is already possible in FC6 using kickstart. You can specify the updates repo in the interactive installation in Fedora too but there are some wrinkles that needs to be sorted out and it is not activated by default (probably not for Fedora 7 either though Fedora 8 is possible) . FC6 also provides repository metadata that classifies bugs as bug fixes, security fixes etc and one of the developers is planning on a yum security fixes only plugin which might be useful if you dont want to get all updates.

Criticism on robustness is valid ( but it is better to help rather than spread misconceptions and describe implementation flaws as design) but due to Fedora updates policy of including newer upstream versions generally, the number of updates are not a indication of security fixes or robustness. There are other indicators like regressions etc. It is getting better. Sooner if you help.

"""
Criticism on robustness is valid ( but it is better to help rather than spread misconceptions and describe implementation flaws as design) but due to Fedora updates policy of including newer upstream versions generally, the number of updates are not a indication of security fixes or robustness. There are other indicators like regressions etc. It is getting better. Sooner if you help.
"""

I'm not spreading misconceptions. I'm commenting upon what has been true for years now. An implementation detail that remains true for years may as well be design.

As to "sooner if I help", we're not talking about a few guys trying to make their own distro and looking for help. Fedora is one of the best funded distros out there. Quite possibly *the* best funded. Most of its many developers are paid by Redhat. If RedHat wanted it stable it would be stable.

Why should regular folks contribute their time, for free, to try to make it stable if RedHat doesn't care to make it stable, and arguably does not want it stable? Why should they not contribute their time and effort to a distro for which stability is a major goal rather than a secondary consideration?

"
I'm not spreading misconceptions. I'm commenting upon what has been true for years now. An implementation detail that remains true for years may as well be design"

A implementation detail regardless of the length of its time should always be treated separate from design. Software engineeeing 101.

"Why should regular folks contribute their time, for free, to try to make it stable if RedHat doesn't care to make it stable, and arguably does not want it stable? Why should they not contribute their time and effort to a distro for which stability is a major goal rather than a secondary consideration?"

Fedora is a community project where everyone can contribute. If a single entity has to take on all its tasks then it would purely be a commercial product. What makes it a community project where everyone can contribute and does to various extends is the volunteer contributors. Much of the packages you can get from Fedora Extras, L10N, documentation etc.

Red Hat does employ people to lead the QA team in Fedora and write automated tests that help improve robustness. So there is no doubt that there is a focus in it. RHEL 5 for example is derivative of FC6 so there is a commercial interest in doing this.

However the scope of Fedora is much larger than RHEL and including the latest software makes it much more difficult to provide the level of robustness and hence more community participation is necessary.